Getting the surname spelling right

Those few line about a Shropshire village have echoes within my own researches and Dawley (Shropshire) in particular, although my researches concentrated on the early to mid 1800's. I was seeking the family of a Thomas Webb from Dawley and what made this research more exciting was Dawley and WEBB have famous connections with (Captain) Mathew Webb of channel swimming fame who was born in Dawley, and had a brother Thomas.

As I have posted previously about my extensive searching for a connection I won't repeat them here. Suffice to say although my ancestor bore the same name as Mathew's brother - and born within a few years of one another - in the end I had to own that they were two different families. The Captain's father and brother were doctors' whereas mine came from good old coal mining stock. (I also concur about forenames being repetitive hence Thomas in both families)

 

I have seen some sources try to suggest that my husband's 3x great-grandmother is related to Lord Nelson because her last name was Nelson. All I know about her is that her father was Reverend Nelson, no first name - not a chance. She was from Ireland, born in 1784 and died in Canada in 1883.

 

Changing surnames have been the cause of endless false paths, time wasting and frustration in my researches. On my mother's side I faced the inevitable problems of tracing her Morgan line in Wales. To make things worse, it was common at one time for first and second names to be switched in different registers. Lewis Morgan became Morgan Lewis - and back again. Layered on that, every male seemed to be called Edward, Thomas, David or Robert. And if one died young a later child was given the name. The 1881 census was a blizzard of cousins with identical names, often with similar birth dates and usually living within a few doors of each other - sometimes in the same multi-generational home. Meanwhile, my mother's father's family suddenly changed the spelling of their surname around this time - or more likely, it was changed for them by a census enumerator.
On my father's side the surname was spelled seven different ways from the 1911 census onward, via birth, marriage and death registers. My grandmother's maiden name was spelled five different ways. As Russian immigrants, I suppose that was inevitable, and perhaps why they all switched to anglicised names as adults. But enumerators created problems with even simple names. It took me ages to track down my great-grandfather in the 1891 census because he was listed as Obadich Runt rather than Obadiah Hunt. But that was nothing compared with the previous census, when he was living hundreds of miles away with two sons, listed only with initials TH and AS. The former was actually LH - and female - my great grandmother Lavinia Harriet.

 

Remind me never again to complain about researching my own remote welsh 'Jones' line. I have said before and say again, give me first names that roll of the tongue but are totally exclusive combined with a surname that cannot be spelled wrong -Ebenezer Zachariah Smith - fits the bill. Or my favourite trilogy of names, the Biblical sisters Kezia, Kerenhappuch & Jemima that appear in my wife's Tree. Imagine the fun the Enumerators and Transcribers had with those. But I liked your Obadich Runt mix up David.

 

I have the fun of my Jewish line, where one person can be listed under a number of different surnames, and the fun of son's taking their mother's surnames rather than their fathers (that happened at least twice) so I have a few who are written under the original surname: Van Kollem; the name with the dropped "von", spelling switches between C & K; as well as the anglicised "Collins". And then it can honestly be a pot luck for which child took which surname, which version of the surname, or kept their father's name rather than taking their mothers... Or 90% of the family took the father's surname and only two or three just might have taken their mum's surname.

Then of course that doesn't take into account the given names and various spellings of those. Luckily I have been blessed with some hardworking researchers on the JewishGen site to help me out, but then I was trying to find a death register for a member of that particular family and it's very hard to know under what name the death certificate was put... and whether or not the English registrar knew how to spell it!

The anglicisation guaranteed that I ended up with a g-grandmother with the innocuous sounding English name of Catherine Collins, much better than what probably should have originally been her name, something along the lines of Catherine Henshau Leben/Van Kollem (depending of course on which surname her father chose!).

Bob, I also have some interesting names - my Dutch Jewish ancestors make sure of that, but in the rest of my tree I also have a "Kerenhappuch" (luckily not in the direct line) - and her name gets a few different variations, often missing the "h" at the end.